James Gurney

This daily weblog by Dinotopia creator James Gurney is for illustrators, plein-air painters, sketchers, comic artists, animators, art students, and writers. You'll find practical studio tips, insights into the making of the Dinotopia books, and first-hand reports from art schools and museums.

Subscribe

Imaginative Realism

Dinotopia: The World Beneath

"A ravishing, action-packed adventure." —Smithsonian. Now with 32 extra behind-the-scenes pages. Signed by the author/illustrator

Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara

160 pages, fully illustrated in color. Written and illustrated by James Gurney. Signed by the author

Donating = Loving

Writing GurneyJourney takes dozens of hours each month. If you get as much out of this blog as you get from a cup of coffee or a nice meal out, please consider contributing to my citizen journalism in the visual arts.

CG Art

Contact

or by email:gurneyjourney (at) gmail.comSorry, I can't give personal art advice or portfolio reviews. If you can, it's best to ask art questions in the blog comments.

Permissions

All images and text are copyright 2015 James Gurney and/or their respective owners. Dinotopia is a registered trademark of James Gurney. For use of text or images in traditional print media or for any commercial licensing rights, please email me for permission.

However, you can quote images or text without asking permission on your educational or non-commercial blog, website, or Facebook page as long as you give me credit and provide a link back. Students and teachers can also quote images or text for their non-commercial school activity. It's also OK to do an artistic copy of my paintings as a study exercise without asking permission.

Thursday, January 24, 2008

We took a look at speed blur on a previous post. Speed blur is what happens when a camera tracks along with a fast moving object, blurring the entire background along the path that the camera travels.

Motion blur is a little different. It’s what happens when a form moves rapidly in front of a stationary “camera.”

If you look at individual frames from live action films, any fast moving object has a softly blurred edge. The ability to simulate motion blur in CG animation was the revolutionary breakthrough that made the embryonic Pixar company take off in its first successful films. Very primitive CG animation, like traditional stop motion animation, left hard edges on moving objects, which gave a jittery rather than a fluid feeling to the motion.

As painters of still images—digital or traditional— we can take a lesson from these animation pioneers.

This oil painting from Dinotopia: First Flight (1999) shows dancers dressed up as dinosaurs parading at night through a city. They’re caught mid-stride in a wild dance. Their left feet are swinging forward, and their arms are flapping upward.The faster the form is moving, the more it is blurred.

I painted in the figures and the background all wet together, and then softened all the edges in the direction of the line of action. For this kind of soft passagework, a slower drying medium helps.

To suggest that the “camera” was tracking along with the dancers, and to give a sense of shallow focus, I also blurred the details of the crowd across the street. If I had painted all these elements with crisp edges, they would have lost the feeling of depth and motion.

For more examples of motion blur in painting, have a look at the wildlife art of Manfred Schatz. Link.

Really interesting. I flipped through some Renaissance paintings and found no evidence of this effect. Is this entirely the mimicking of the camera's method of capturing things or is there a tradition of this in art before the camera?

Eric, that's a really interesting question. Before photography, there were guys like Vermeer who were interested in "photographic" lens effects and depth of field. And there were artists all the way from cave painters to Velasquez to to Watteau who suggested motion with a kind of soft handling, but I can't think of any who really represented motion blur in photographic terms until artists actually looked at early photo effects. It's hard to underestimate how much photography has influenced our sense of reality.

Jim, when you said "It's hard to underestimate how much photography has influenced our sense of reality." it reminded me of the moment in Al Gore's film, "An Inconvenient Truth" when he discusses how the image of the whole earth as photographed from the Apollo mission invigorated the environmental movement. We suddenly could see in one glance how small and precious our planet is. That's a more obvious instance of how photography influenced our sense of reality than the one you describe in this post.

I'd love to hear about other ways photography has altered our view of reality that seem important to you.

Thank you, yes, I guess I meant to say that we underestimate the impact of photos.

Dan, I was trying to think of ways that photos have affected our sense of reality. One example is how people paint running horses. Up until Muybridge took his famous action stills, everyone persisted in showing them with front and rear legs out from the body at the same time. No one did that again once they saw the photos.

You mentioned the global view that Gore cited, and I would add to that the recent Hubble photos of constellation formation, and on a micro scale the scanning electron photos.

I always thought Renoir's painting Dance at Bougival has some sort of motion blur to it, because the background has been blurred and her white dress looks a bit blurred at the bottom edge. Perhaps he had photos to paint from?